the rhetoric of pink

I’m in my hotel in Frankfurt with pretty poor wireless connection stolen from elsewhere, but I thought I’d pass on this brief NY Times article about the use of pink in visiting football locker rooms as a psychological strategy at the University of Iowa. Via Eric Stoller, this Insider Higher Ed article about a law professor filing a Title IX suit against U of I for the use of pink in the locker rooms:

Today, one of those professors is revisiting the (until now) dormant debate. After protesting the pink locker room at a Hawkeye home game in November, Jill Gaulding plans to file a complaint under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions, now that a new Iowa presidential administration is in place.

“I don’t think this is about Hayden Fry or his intention in the 1980s; I think this is about how people understand the locker room in 2007,” said Gaulding, who has since left Iowa and now practices employment discrimination law in Minnesota. “This [is] understood as a funny version of the slur that goes on in athletics about playing like a girl, playing like a sissy” — and worse, she said, the university has perpetuated the insult in “a very official, permanent way.”

“It’s based on a concept of gender hierarchy that says not only are boys and girls different, but more important it’s better to be a boy than a girl; it’s shameful to be a girl,” said Gaulding, who is researching a book on cognitive bias and gender discrimination. “Anyone who’s not deeply in denial understands and acknowledges that the pink locker room taps into this very long tradition of using gender as a put-down.”

What does pink mean to “us” in our society? Certainly, I think Gaulding is correct in that the use of pink taps into the feminization of the color, and the correlated demeaning of manhood associated with it. Why does pink make us more docile? Because of the codified affective regime that goes along with it. Some are saying that Gaulding needs to pick her battles, that this one isn’t worth fight for. This may be correct — it seems like a battle that probably can’t be won, and might only calcify those who think this is a ridiculous claim. On the other hand, it might be a great educational moment about the use of color and the construction of manhood.

I often wonder about the use of pink: its adoption by many gay and queer men, its use by straight men on shirts that read “Real Men Wear Pink,” and its use to demean men in attempts to make them “not manly enough” — as is what is happening during football games at the U of I campus. Frankly, I think that the locker room should not be painted pink — but then again, if we go deep enough into critical gender studies of male behavior, is the ultimate end the end of sporting events like football that have been built around concepts of competition, domination, manhood, etc.?